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Sep
16
2011

The Frankfurt School, Part Two

THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL AND CRITICAL THEORY, PART TWO

It was the fate of the Frankfurt School, or the Institut für Sozialforschung,  to be in the wrong place doing the right thing.  The members of the School, Max Horkheimer, Friedrich Pollock, Herman Marcuse, Franz Neumann, Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno, et al., had the intellectual ability to understand that traditional Marxism was no longer adequate as an analytic tool for contemporary society and had the uncanny ability to see into the future. The swerve away from traditional Marxist demands for a social revolution refocused their collective attention on the the psychological interaction between culture and the individual.  At the end of the Great War, the German people had an unprecedented opportunity to free themselves from oppression.  The working classes could have seized power and a genuine social revolution could have taken place.  But the lower classes had proved to be passive and let the chance to direct their own destinies pass them by.  The newly formed Institut asked why?  The answer, the scholars believed, could be found, not in the theories of Karl Marx but in the theories of Sigmund Freud.

The accomplishments of the  Institut für Sozialforschung in the decade between 1923 and 1933 were extraordinary.  The Frankfurt School combined a new academic discipline, sociology, with traditional Marxist economics, with Freudian theory into an interdisciplinary discourse about modern society.  The School rejected the old Marxist notion that the “secret” machine of history was economics and that the dialectical clash was between the classes.  Although the scholars directed attention to the young Hegelian Marx, they also rejected absolutism or “identity thinking.”  The School rejected the fetishism of any one particular “engine” of society and rejected the idea that any one aspect of the superstructure could be separated from the larger whole. The philosophers, who came from many different academic backgrounds, understood that culture could not be separated from society and that social conditions had to be examined by combining theory and praxis, or theory with empirical data.

The first major study of society undertaken by the Frankfurt School was supervised by Erich Fromm, examined the German working class, employing empirical data interpreted from a psychoanalytic, was never published.  By the time it was completed, this important body of work revealed a disconcerting truth that the working classes were receptive to the fascist message of the Nazis.  It is on the unsettling note of this unpublished study that the Frankfurt School spent its last days in Germany.  Frankfurt was a city with a new university and other free thinking intellectual institutions where Jews could exist in an unusually open society, relatively free of anti-Semitism.  It was easy for the scholars who were mostly Jewish to be blind to the ugly forces that were gathering against them.

That said, despite their denials of anti-Semitism or of the significance of their Jewish identity, the members were not helpless in the face of danger.  The funds of the Institut, generously supported by the Weil family, father Hermann and son Felix, were transferred to Holland by 1933 and the School moved to Geneva just before Hitler came into power.  On the very day of his ascendency to the ruler of Germany, Hitler’s minions seized the home shared by Horkheimer and Pollock.  A few months later the School’s library was seized.  For the next twenty years the Frankfurt School would be on the move. With this move to New York, the School was confronted with a new and alien culture that was young and had little tradition of scholarly speculative thinking.  But New York was the only available haven and most of the scholars of the Frankfurt School became American citizens and most of the European scholars who followed them to the United States became Americanized.

Driven to New York by the wrath of Adolf Hitler, like so many émigrés, the members of the Frankfurt School reconvened in New York city, under the protective affiliation with Columbia University.  It should be stressed that the scholars were still searching for a way to study society, its culture, and its people by combining theoretical insights from several academic areas with empirical research.  It should also be stressed that the Frankfurt School was a research institute which brought together speculative insights or hypothetical thinking with a gathering of factual data.  The research was propelled by changing times, modernity.  Modern life in the twentieth century required a new means of understanding and a new mode of analysis, but the century was evolving so drastically that it was difficult to grasp the changes.  In a single decade, Germany had gone from a nation stunned by a shocking military defeat, from a nation crippled by a world wide Depression, to a country under the thrall of a man who put its inhabitants under a hypnotic spell.

Just how evil the enchantment was, the scholars could not imagine, but they understood that an entire population was allowing itself to be led by an individual who was hostile to freedom of thought.  When the members of the Frankfurt School began to gather in New York in the 1930s, the members began to redirect its study of modern society in general and in particular the nature of the personality that responded so supinely to authority.  However, with a change in venue came a change in scene and a change in methodology.  American scholarship tended to be pragmatic and practical, and, as a result, its research tended towards empiricism.  The members of the Frankfurt School were aware that however sophisticated and enlightened their philosophy, their mode of empirical operation was “primitive.”  Although it is often thought that the transplanted Institut was isolated from American intellectuals, there was enough interaction to change the working methods of the Frankfurt scholars and to change the ideas of American intellectuals.

The most important book on the subject of the Institut in America is the recently published The Frankfurt School in Exile by Thomas Wheatland of 2009.  In contrast to the focus on the New York experience, Martin Jay’s The Dialectical Imagination, written thirty years earlier,  provides an excellent description of the philosophy and theories of the school in general. The move to New York changed the Institut from a group of scholars who still spoke in Marxist terminology to scholars who spoke in more neutralized terms.  The Frankfurt School moved to Critical Theory, a critical analysis of society through a variety of methods.  It was in New York that the school logically completed its earlier studies of the compliant mentality of the working class in Germany.  These studies were also a study of fascism and eventually anti-Semitism, the seminal topics of the unsettled era.

From the beginning, the Frankfurt School insisted on maintaining German as it language of publication, as a way of preserving what was left of German intellectualism untainted by Nazi thought and ideology. Certainly such a decision resulted in a separation of Critical Theory from an audience of English readers, but it was an important philosophical position on the part of a group of Jewish scholars hunted from their homeland.  Fromm’s The German Workers Under the Weimar Republic was finally published as Escape From Freedom  in 1942. Although Fromm, who had been in New York since 1932, eventually broke with the Institut, the idea of the questionnaires used in his study was carried over into the School’s American study, Studien über Autorität Familie.  This five year study was typical of the collaborative nature of the Frankfurt School in that the work was based upon three essays by Horkheimer and Marcuse and Fromm who speculated on the meaning of the empirical results.

In contrast to the study of the working class, the study of authority centered on the bourgeois family and the leadership of the father as well as the working class family.  In late capitalism, the authority of the father had been undermined when the ultimate unquestionable authority of the patriarchal system by the state itself.  Thus the authority of the father became increasingly as “irrational” or based on assertion rather than fact.  Women, for whatever reason, had not taken advantage of the freedoms offered to them and submitted, like the children, to irrational authority.  The ultimate authorities were the corporations and the government but the intimate authority within the family was the father whose demand for obedience created a regressive personality with a weak ego.  In Freudian terms, the “superego” of institutions were too remote to be effective, leaving the individual at the mercy of arbitrary emotional authority, anxious of its powers.

The father’s demands created an individual who was masochistic and passive and susceptible to appellations from other paternal father figures demanding obedience.  The study examined this new personality type, described as sado-mascohistic,  to draw its outlines. The Studien über Autorität Familie was based upon work done with German families but avoided the component of anti-Semitism that haunted Nazi ideology.  It was time for the Institut to  study fascism and America was a safe place to undertake this class.  Franz Neumann led the way with is groundbreaking work, Behemoth. The Study and Practice of National Socialism in 1942, a monumental study of the Nazis rise to power.  Neumann exemplified the split that was forming in the Frankfurt School.  He was more conventionally Marxist in his approach to the rise of fascism and based Hitler’s success on economic conditions and the splintering of class interests by the Nazi form of “socialism.”  Fascism was essentially corporate capitalism founded upon the kind of authority that undercut the clash of social groups and replaced social struggles with nationalist unity.  Neumann’s orthodox Marxism which posited the economy as the engine of the Nazis would always be part of the explanation for how Hitler came to power, but he ignored an element that Horkheimer and other members of the School considered to be of great importance: mass media.

Mass media introduced a new element not fully covered by a Marxist analysis, psychoanalysis, or the mentality of the group.  What was the best way to study a society increasingly manipulated by technology? The economic conditions of Germany were used by the Nazis to bring back an older form of authority, the father figure, Der Führer, to whom all eyes turned.  For Neumann, who had been arrested before he was able to leave Germany, Nazi authority, based upon terror and coercion and propaganda, mirrored the violence of capitalist bosses against labor. For Horkheimer, Nazi authority was based upon the unprecedented role of mass media, used and manipulated by Goebbels and his control of propaganda in a way which assaulted the psychology of the population.

Neither scholar could see where the removal of a rational institution and its replacement by an irrational authority would lead until after the Second World War.  By the end of 1945, it became clear that the members of the Institut für Sozialforschung were “survivors,” beneficiaries of their foresight in leaving Germany at the first indication of danger. Some would never return to Germany but the next chapter of the Frankfurt School would take place in the capital of mass media, Los Angeles, California, where Horkheimer and Adorno would study “The Culture Industry.”

The Next Post will be “The Frankfurt School, Part Three.”

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

 

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Sep
09
2011

The Frankfurt School, Part One

THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL AND CRITICAL THEORY

PART ONE

“A categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind; to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen.”

Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 1966                                                                                                          

While Karl Marx did not seem to foresee the importance of commodities in restraining the social revolution he predicted, the early decades of the twentieth century opened well for Marxism.  If one defines” Marxism” as the political manifestations of his theories the surely the Russian Revolution was the culmination of his predictions.  The lower classes rose up against their oppressors and the former Empire became one nation, under Communism.  The Great War accelerate the revolt against hereditary powers and broke up the aging empires, freeing a number of new nations to make their own destiny—choosing between communism or democracy—in acts of what Woodrow Wilson called “self-determination.”  The choice was not clear-cut.  Democracy, to people used to autocratic rule, was tempting but dangerous, and old habits of dependence and obedience often resulted in the replacement of one ruler for another.   As would be seen in the new Soviet Union, the high hopes for a Communist utopia were quickly dashed by the resumption of a totalitarian rule under Lenin and then Stalin.

Like Russia, Germany had a long history of powerful rulers and when the Great War ended in the nation’s defeat, the people had no experience of democracy.  After the abdication of the Kaiser in November 1918, socialism seemed like a middle ground for a nation unaccustomed to self-rule and in need of state administration. The replacement for a militaristic regime was a coalition government, the Weimar Republic. Early on, there were struggles to establish some kind of Communist rule, as in the Soviet Union, but the left-wing revolutionaries were assassinated.  The dream that Karl Marx had of a “dictatorship of the proletariat” had run aground as the forces of socialism and fascism struggled for power.  The working class had less interest in social change than the intellectuals, who were dedicated activists.  One can assume that in Germany there had been enough change: a war had been lost, a Kaiser had been deposed, a nation had to be rebuilt, and many of the restraints of centuries of political oppression and bourgeois repression were lifted.   No one wanted another social disruption.  There were other diversions afoot.

Berlin became the site of an outbreak of widespread social indulgence and experimentation in once-forbidden pleasures against the backdrop of a corrupt and ineffectual government that struggled to manage a modern nation in a modern world.  Crippled by war reparations and haunted by the traumas of the War, the German people appeared to have little taste for more social disruption.  It is against this backdrop of the promise and the failure of a revolution that would liberate the working classes that the famed Frankfurt School was launched.  Disillusioned by the failure of left wing concerns to have any resonance, Felix Weil, the son of a wealthy German industrialist, Hermann Weil, received the funding from his father to found an institute to study contemporary society.

Weil brought together an event called the First Marxist Work Week in the summer of 1922 in Thuringia.  This “week” was attended by Georg Lukács, Karl Korsch, Richard Sorge, Friederich Pollock, Karl August Wittfogel, Bela Fogarasi, Konstantin Zetkin, and so on. The stimulating success of the gathering of intellectuals inspired Weil to establish a permanent institute.  The chosen site was Frankfurt.  Frankfurt was an island of intellectualism during the 1920s, due in no small part to the recent establishment of the University in 1914.  With a loose affiliation with the University, the Institut für Sozialforschung was founded in 1923.   The first director was Kurt Albert Gerlach but he died, then for a brief period the Institut was directed by Carl Grünberg, an Austrian Marxist who edited the first European journal of labor and socialist history.  Under Carl Grünberg, the Institut was led by a traditional orthodox Marxist, whose old fashioned “vulgar” Marxism was not shared by his colleagues.  Conventional Marxism would not be the direction of the group of scholars who gathered in Frankfurt.

After Grünberg had a stroke, he was forced to resign and from 1931 on the Institute was directed by Max Horkheimer.  Under Horkheimer, the Institut took a different direction, away from orthodox or “vulgar” Marxism and towards a new understanding of society—a sociology of the modernist culture.   If one term characterizes the philosophers of the Frankfurt School, it would be “assimilated Jew” from a privileged upper middle class intellectual background. This description comes up over and over in the writings on the School, from Martin Jay to Zoltán Tar to Thomas Wheatland, and the ambivalent social position of being “assimilated Jews” would seal the fate of the Institut and its members.  Max Horkheimer and his associate, Frederick Pollock, were joined by Leo Lowenthal, Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno, Hermann Marcuse, Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, and Erich Fromm, all of whom were Jewish (Adorno was half-Jewish).  Indeed, Jews were very assimilated in Germany and that nation was where the most Christian-Jewish intermarriages took place in Europe.  Although there were signs of intolerance and anti-Semitism in Germany, the scholars of the Institut insisted that there was no “Jewish question.”  Because of a cultural heritage they though little of, these scholars would be forced to leave Germany and live in exile for over a decade.  Working in New York and Los Angeles, the members of the Frankfurt School would forge a new form of neo-Marxism, Critical Theory.  Most of these émigrés would never return to Germany, the nation that had persecuted them.  They would remain in their adopted country, the United States of America.

Although there was interest in the Weil family of understanding prejudice, when it was founded, the main goal of the School was more broad.  Sociology was a relatively new academic discipline and was, at that time, mostly based upon empirical research.  The only means of examining society from a theoretical perspective was Marxism.  The question was now, which Marxism?  The older and now discredited Marxism which reduced society to a “mode of production?”  Or a new approach to the ideas of Karl Marx, based upon his early works?  The Institut returned to the young Marx in his more Hegelian position, in other words, the scholars revisited dialectical materialism.  The goal was to develop a theory that would allow the appropriate kind of study for this new modern society.  Modernism, as it existed after the Great War, was out of the intellectual reach of traditional Marxist thinking.  What these intellectuals would retain from Marx is the concept of “critique,” which means to analyze and to study social conditions from the inside.  Thus the Frankfurt School began to develop Critical Theory, a means whereby contemporary society in post-war Germany could be examined through a combination of empirical research linked to a theoretical hypothesis, a new combination—Hegelian-Marxism.

From the beginning, the Frankfurt School maintained its independence from any and all institutions, the University of Frankfurt and later Columbia University.  In a politically unstable era, the Institut wisely decided to take a non-political position.  Even though the scholars maintained neutrality, as individuals they were politically committed to change.  The School was able to avoid local controversies by articulating a unique methodology.  Although in its early years, the members accepted the traditional Marxist, base-superstucture mode of analysis from traditional Marxism, later, after 1930, the notion of the base was jettisoned and the scholars concentrated on the superstructure or culture.  In addition to returning to the beginnings of Marxist thinking, the Institut employed another innovative element as the basis of its studies, Freudian theory, or psychoanalysis.  Society has its own psychology and different groups in society have their own particular mindsets.  People was moved by their social and economic conditions, but they are also moved by the ways in which they think which are based in the individual and his or her psyche.

Sigmund Freud, just coming into wide acceptance, in the 1920s, considered the family to be the basis of a person’s psyche which formed certain reactions to childhood training.  The psychic forces constructed by the parents would then play themselves out in the social arena.  The members of the Frankfurt School adapted Freudian theories to their studies of contemporary society.  The result of this new methodology was an integration or fusion among various disciplines, philosophy, sociology, psychology to form an interdisciplinary approach to better understand the current political situation in Germany.  The uniqueness of the Frankfurt School is this mixture of a multiplicity of approaches to understanding the individual within the group.  As time went on, it became more and more clear that the “individual” or “subject” was a “convenient fiction,” and that people are constructed by their environments and by instrumental societies.  The Frankfurt School studied a sociology of knowledge or a materialist theory of society which was buttressed by empirical research in order to achieve a synthetic view of culture. All knowledge and all thinking was conditioned by concrete historical situations.  There was, therefore, no fetishization of the individual who could not be transcendent, nor of culture itself, because it could never be autonomous.

For these philosophers in this changed society,  Marxism was no longer the philosophy of social revolution. But why not?  Why had the German working class not taken advantage of the opportunity to forge a strong alliance that would impact government policies?  One of the most important studies undertaken by the Institut was an examination of the German working class, supervised by Erich Fromm.  In order to determine the social consciousness of the laborers, Fromm used questionnaires in which the answers were taken down verbatim.  Horkheimer analyzed the answers through keywords and the conclusion of the study was that the working class was not only passive, rather than revolutionary, but also receptive to the message of the new rising political force, fascism.  For a variety of reasons, the Institut chose not to publish the depressing findings.   But what they learned from their research was precinct and predictive of things to come.  Although Fromm would drift away from Freud and the Institut  when it moved to America, this study was the first of similar studies of social attitudes and their root causes that would come from the Frankfurt School.

Once Hitler was elected in 1933, the Institut für Sozialforschung was in a precarious position, and Horkheimer was not blind to the rising tide of fascism and its dangers to a group of left-thinking Jews.  The funds of the Institut were transferred to a bank in Holland and the Frankfurt School prepared to decamp.  The Nazis closed down the Institut as quickly and as ruthlessly as they had shuttered the Bauhaus.   Indeed, by the time Herman Marcuse joined the School in 1932, he was assigned to its new outpost, Geneva.  The School also opened branches in Paris and London and in these cities, the preferred form of publication, the Zeitschrift, or short essay, rather than long book, could continue.  When the Nazis came to power, most of the members were already on the move, leaving behind a magnifcant 60,000 volume library to be seized by the fascists.  Horkheimer was among the first faculty of the University of Frankfurt to be dismissed because he was Jewish, and he left for Geneva.  Adorno went to London, and Walter Benjamin, who was loosely associated with the Institut, went to Paris.  Those who stayed behind, such as Wittfogel, were simply thrown in a concentration camp.

In Germany, fascism had taken over the revolutionary position once held by Marxism.  The Frankfurt School now had new goals.  First the Institut had to save itself. Switzerland could not be a permanent home, as Horkheimer already sensed the coming sympathies for fascism in that neutral nation.  Second, the Institut had to preserve German culture and remove German intellectual heritage and contemporary intellectual thinking to a site where it could not be tainted by Nazi philosophy.  This self-imposed mission was deeply important to the members of the Institut.  The Nazis were already appropriating German culture for their own ends and in the process was polluting the history of German intellectual and artistic culture, from Nietzsche to Wagner.  It was important to continue an uninterrupted strain of German thinking and the only place to do this was in New York City.  Opportunities in London were limited and the intellectuals in Paris were decidedly unwelcoming to German scholars, so the Institut moved towards another alliance with another institution, Columbia University.

Over time, all the members of the Frankfurt School gathered together in New York.  In continuing their determination to carry on German culture, the Institut members decided to write and publish in German.  During the early years of Nazi rule, the School worked to rescue and fund European scholars on the run.  Although some two hundred intellectuals were indebted to the well-funded School, Horkheimer and Adorno were unable to save their close associate, Walter Benjamin who simply did not want to emigrate to New York.  Benjamin was finally persuaded to leave France after the Nazi takeover and made his way to the Spanish border.  Once in Spain, he had passage to New York, thanks to the Institut.  Unfortunately, in a now famous tragic tale, the border between France and Spain was closed on that day at that point and Benjamin, in despair, committed suicide.  The members of the Institut were horrified and devastated.  In contrast, Wittfogel was freed and found his way to the safety of America.

The now-common term “critical theory” actually stems from the work done by the Frankfurt School in these post-Weimar years.  It is customary to think of Critical Theory as an analysis of authority and a study of power and how totalitarian forces manipulate society, but this was a relatively new position for the  School.  In America, the scholars shifted their foci.  While in Germany, the Frankfurt School had concentrated on interdisciplinary studies attempting to understand the German working class.  As the impact of fascism upon society became more apparent, it was clear that there were psychoanalytical aspects to the acceptance of Hitler by the Germans.  In American the studies of the Institut led to an investigation into the “authoritarian personality,” or the kind of mind-set that would accept a totalitarian leader.  The studies began, not in politics, but with the bourgeois family and how the passive acceptance of leadership had led to Hitler.

When Horkheimer managed to relocated the Institut to Columbia University in New York, the social and political theories of the School was impacted by the pragmatism and empirical methods of American scholars.  It is America that the scholars began to shift their attention from the failures of communism and the willingness of the working class to follow fascism to the growing importance of technological communication in shaping social responses. Mass media and mass spectacle had come of age, and the power of art forms could be used for good or for evil.  The scholars of the Frankfurt School were among the first to understand the importance of mass media and national culture.  They were among the first to sound the alarm and among the first to delineate the consequences of new communication technologies upon culture and society.

But the critique of a culture shaped by technology was also a critique of the Enlightenment.  Indeed, it can be said that the Frankfurt School initiates the study of the consequences of the Enlightenment through the critique of philosophy by philosophy.  The ideas of the Enlightenment had been working themselves out for two centuries, but, until the Frankfurt School, Reason and Rational Thinking as  concepts  had not been examined in terms of their social  consequences.  Certainly, Nietzsche had railed against the kind of reason that resulted in nihilism, but, unlike the philosophers of the Frankfurt School, he did not have the vantage point of observing the unintended consequences of “Enlightenment,” such as the Holocaust.  Totalitarian governments and “authoritarian” personalities and blinded obedience were seen as direct consequences of reason gone wrong.

The effects of totalitarian thinking became one of the primary concerns of  the Frankfurt School.  The Frankfurt School shifted Marxism into the Twentieth Century by observing contemporary culture, its ideologies and how these belief systems impacted society through this new technological world of mass communication.  The Frankfurt School and its associates were be hard hit by the increasing oppression of fascism and were dislocated during the Second World War.  As intellectuals, they were in grave danger; as Jews their lives were in peril.  Some went into exile, some survived, some did not.  Those that lived survived to continue their roles as defenders of Marxism as a mode of critique that revealed the true intentions of ideology, laying the groundwork for what would eventually be called “post” or “neo” Marxism.

The next post on The Frankfurt School, Part Two, will examine the work of the Institut in America.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com


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Sep
10
2010

Naturalism and Art-for-Art’s Sake

Art-for-Art’s-Sake in Context

In the Salon of 1846,  the poet and art critic, Charles Baudelaire argued that average people (in modern clothes) were as heroic as any Roman heroes of ancient times. In the waning days of the July Monarchy, the Greco-Roman legends and myths represented in French Academic art  were no longer relevant to a society which was rapidly modernizing. Art, Baudelaire insisted, should be about “us” and “our” heroism and “our” time.  Within the world of Academic art, his idea of conceiving of the contemporary period as being special or even worthy of depiction was controversial and heretical.  The emotional investment that the Academy and its artists had in the classical tradition has to be understood, not as a stubborn preference for a particular style, but a reaction to the rapid and unstoppable social and economic changes.

These alterations to the cultural fabric were unstoppable, beyond anyone’s control.  Even worse, the consequences of the constant upheavals could not be predicted.  It is also important to realized the stress the French people had been under since the French Revolution, as the political scene veered wildly from King to Emperor to revolution to war and rebellions.  Periodically the nation would be caught up in a never-ending civil war which was a struggle between the lower and middle classes for political power.  Only one class could rule, according to the bourgeois mindset, and the upstart class must be crushed.  When seen in the context of the desperate rear guard struggle against cultural change, the intensity of the artistic quarrels of the Nineteenth century is easier to comprehend.

Classical art and traditional Academic teachings, whether philosophical or technical, were a bulwark of reassurance, as if the “timeless” would protect the nation from all that was “modern.”  The “modern” and “modernité” were, quite simply, dangerous to the status quo and to the stability that was so hard to come by and so hard to maintain.  The Second Empire devoted enormous amounts of time and energy to controlling thought.  Previous freedoms were revoked. The press was strangled and killed and the publications that were left were heavily censored.  Art was strictly controlled by the government.

Those who dedicated themselves to economic pursuits were celebrated and ennobled by the state, but those who rejected the bourgeois lifestyle were suspect.  It is out of these suspect people, poets, writers, visual artists, déclasse members of la bohème, that the new concept of art-for-art’s-sake developed.  This new approach to art and how and why art should be made differed from the Romantic justification for art in that, with the Naturalist artists, their stance was impersonal rather than personal, and objective rather than subjective.  A reflection of the demand for individualism, the Romantic artist based everything on personal vision and personal expression.  But the Naturalist perspective comes, not from selfhood, but from science.

The Naturalist artist had a new role, that of an observer who was disinterested and detached.  In some ways, this role sounds similar to that of the Realist artist—to depict life as it really was.  However, there is an important difference both in intent and in effect: the Realist artist was “interested.”  In the art of Gustave Courbet, for example, the purpose of recording ordinary life was to make a political point, giving  the artist a social purpose and the art a social role.  Courbet and his art were intended to work within the stystem, reforming it from the inside.  This new social utility of art and the resulting political engagement was a necessary wedge between the old Romantic “art-for-art’s-sake” and the new concept of “art-for-art’s-sake.”

Science and technology became the basis for knowledge, and Baudelaire’s ideas were in tune with an intensified historical self-consciousness and self-examination that can be found in other disciplines of the time, especially history, which was beginning to take its modern form.  After Courbet, it became necessary to free art from its role as political commentator and social savior.  Art making had to be a detached exercise, and, after Courbet, content should not count, subject matter could not be significant.  At this stage, the object of artistic contemplation could not be totally neutralized but it could be downplayed.  The artists and writers who needed to distance themselves from the old-fashioned Realists deliberately selected subject which were both modern and commonplace.

By commonplace, they meant ordinary as opposed to ancient heroics, but another point needs to be made.  These members of la bohéme were bound to the middle class, depending, like Courbet and Manet, upon private family wealth to fund their artistic rebellion against the establishment.  Men like that were snobs with a profound distaste for the middle classes who were conformist and ordinary, and it is important to understand the importance of their hostility towards that which they examined.  While taking a disinterested stance, the artists exposed the banality of modern life in all its excrutiating detail.  Mere depiction condemned, simple description challenged, hence the crushing reaction of the forces of law and order leveled against these vulgarians. The approach of depicting modern life without trying to exoticize it, symbolize it, moralize it, or idealize it was the basis of  the current Naturalist literature of Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert.  Flaubert insisted that it would be a mistake to conflate Realism with Naturalism.

Everyone thinks I am in love with reality, whereas i actually detest it.  It was in hatred of realism that I undertood this book (Madame Bovary). But I equally despise the false brand of idealism which is such a hollow mockery in the present age…I wrote Madame Bovary to annoy Champfleury, I wanted to show that bourgeois dreariness and mediocre sentiments could sustain beautiful language.

What is important about Flaubert’s statement is, first, his “hatred” for “reality,” i. e. bourgeois life; and second,  is his stress on language.  Flaubert looked at  the sordid word of the unsalvagable middle class and turns that world into a linguistic exercise.  The writer pointed out that is is important to “write the mediocre well,” that is, the content is irrelevant and the form becomes paramount.  The trick is to transcend reality with the transformative power of language.  But this language had to be a neutralized speech: rhetoric had to be stripped away, poetry had to be eliminated.  This new way of writing was one of observation composed of detailed description for no particular purpose other than the sheer act of writing.  Writing was for the sake of writing.  From the perspective of Naturalism, Flaubert’s visual counterpart was Edouard Manet.

Manet may or may not have been Baudelaire’s “painter of modern life,” but he was engaged in the same enterprise as the writer—that of using the language of the discipline against the discipline in order to change, not literature or art, but to change its language.  If the new task of the artist, inherited from the older Realists, was to avoid the “poncif,” then the next step would be to use the scenes of modern life as a vehicle for a modern language.  It would be incorrect to argue that Manet’s content was totally neutral, nor were the scenes of modern life he selected arbitrary.  True, his paintings were charged with social meaning but, in their own time, the truly sensational aspect of his work was not his content but the way he painted: his language.

In The Judgment of Paris (2006), Ross King pointed out that the public cared little for the nudity or prostitution or Manet’s Dejeunner sur l’herbe or Olympia and that the critics were more concerned with his sins against painting techniques.  Emile Zola was one of the writers who urged the public to look away from Manet’s content to his style of painting but we should not read his defense anachronistically as a justification for formalism or a formal reading of a painting.  The importance of Manet, in his own time, is how he took the language of art and renewed it, freeing, painting itself from it traditional role in representation.  As Pierre Bourdieu in The Rule of Art (1992) expressed it,

This is the complexity of the artistic revolution: under pain of excluding oneself from the game, one cannot revolutionize a field without mobilizing or invoking the experiences of the history of the field and the great heretics—baudelaire, Flaubert, and Manet—inscribe themselves explicitly in this history of the field, mastering its specific capital much more completely than their contemporaries, so that revolutions take the form of return to sources, to purity of origins.

“Art-for-art’s-sake” under naturalism was an attempt to remake literature so that writing would be simply writing: word-making; and to remake art so that painting would be simply painting: mark making.  Simple, but profoundly disruptive to a society constantly on the brink of disintegration.  During the Second Empire, art should be mobilized to the purposes of the State and anyone who was suspected of not doing the proper patriotic duty would suffer the fate of an outsider.  Like it or not, art-for-art’s-sake was political stance and a social position.

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Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

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Aug
13
2010

Podcast 27: Sincerity and Artifice in Realism

SINCERITY AND ARTIFICE IN REALISM

By the middle of the nineteenth century, Realism was an international movement.  In England, with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, “realism” was a form of a return to the moral and ethical purpose of art in the Early Renaissance.  However, in France, “realism” divided along two poles, “sincerity,” as with Millet and Courbet, or “artifice,” as with Manet.

 
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Apr
16
2010

Hegel, Art and the Dialectical Method

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Art and the Dialectical Method

Paradoxically, G. W. F. Hegel created a tripartite philosophical system that attempted to flee the static universe of Emmanuel Kant by positing universal and transcendent Absolutes.  For Hegel the subjective mind or spirit created or evolved into the objective mind or spirit that manifested itself by creating a world that was external.  The dialectical of subjective and objective spirit produced the human spirit that was expressed through art, religion and philosophy. Hegel was determined to avoid debate and argument, often the basis of philosophy.  As opposed to putting forward different epistemological systems, Hegel thought that the role of philosophy was to explain the universe.   Rather than getting bogged down in debates over where knowledge could be located, in the realm of the Ideal (Plato) or the Material (Aristotle), Hegel retreated into abstractions, which were based upon the logical and reasonable method of deduction.

Hegel wrote in a deliberately obtuse manner in his major works, The Phenomenology of the Spirit, 1807, The Science of Logic (1813-16) and Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, 1817, refusing to make philosophy either easy or accessible.  He wanted to put philosophy on the same basis as the sciences as a new kind of truth reached through process of trial and error or thesis and antithesis, producing an agreement or synthesis, which is a resolution of conflicts. Science proceeded via this deductive manner from hypothesis to testing to theory.  The theory that resulted from the process of deduction would stand as a thesis until it was tested by a new antithesis.  Theories are never proven.   Theories are always in the process of being tested.  Borrowing deduction from  science, Hegel, like a scientist, sough the truth. The mind had to be always active and always evolving towards an ultimate goal.  Art was part of the mind’s journey towards the truth.

Being conscious means having a mind, but Hegel disagreed with Kant’s static philosophy and insisted that contemporary history had to be taken into account as it affected the mind.  Unlike Kant, Hegel located his philosophy in history.  Kant’s categories of the mind were static and ahistorical and immobilized by his architectonic system, but Hegel’s concept of the mind was dynamic and he considered the functions of the mind to be development, over time, or across history.  IF the mind is not independent of reality but is experiencing things or content, then the mind changes constantly, so that the self and the object are not distinct but dialectic and complementary structures within an experience.  In other words, there is no object without a self and no self without an object.  For Hegel, the Ultimate Truth is that consciousness is not substance but a prime metaphysical concept.

Hegel developed the Begriff or the notion or concept generated within content and reflects its uniqueness.  The mind creates culture and therefore, logically, the mind is not independent and can never get away from its other or content.  Hegel’s other major concept is Being, or experiencing content, meaning that the mind is always changing and shaping forms.  Hegel disliked the formalism of traditional rationalism, which forces content to conform to arbitrarily chosen concepts, ignoring mediating character of experience. Opposing Kant’s architectonic structure of categories, Hegel considered the Search for “truth” to be both a developmental and an empirical inquiry.  The mind is an inner force creating and shaping outer forms.

The result of Hegel’s challenges to Kant was several conclusions. First, truth was a historical or genetic approach, the evolution or necessary outcome of series of conflicts and corrections.  Second, Negation actually had the power to advance mind to higher levels.  And third, Experience “carries the process of its own dissolution within itself…” For Hegel, the   Self was a process of dissolution and the Spirit was our own experience, in other words, a living process.  Thus True Reality was the process of reinstating self-identity or the process of self’s becoming.  Reality was related to science, which is a process in its entirety or a total system of knowledge.  The result is the Whole or Reality itself, which is actual knowledge.  Paraphrasing Kant, Hegel remarked, “Content is nothing but the transformation of form into content, and form is nothing but the transformation of content into form…”

Truth, for Hegel was an historical approach, an evolution to particular stage, or a necessary outcome of series of conflicts and successive corrections of concrete universals or notions, which are contextual and more precise than abstract universals.  Thesis, antithesis and then synthesis—this is the “progress” of history.  These contradictions between thesis and antithesis are levels of consciousness.  According to Hegel, “The truth is the whole”, in other words, truth is realized in the form of system.  The idea that represents the absolute as spirit (Geist) is the total system of knowledge or reality itself.  “I” am transcended as well as “my object.”

Transcendence is the synthesis of idea and nature or Spirit.  Hegel did not allow for dualism and always sought synthesis or the absolute spirit.  Hegel put forward the concept of Weltgeist or a world spirit or the “universal mind.”  According to Hegel,  “Our epoch is a birth-time, and a period of transition.  The spirit of man has broken with the old order of things hitherto fore prevailing, and with old ways of thinking…”  The paradox in Hegel is the conflict between history itself, which is always pushing the human mind forward, from thesis to antithesis, and the ultimate goal with is abstract and beyond time.  It is here that beauty, the ultimate goal of art, can be found.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

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Apr
02
2010

Podcast 17 Romanticism in England, Part Two

ROMANTICISM IN ENGLAND, PART TWO

“Nature” in England acquired a new identity after the Napoléonic Wars.  In response to the completion of the Enclosure Movement and the  spread of private ownership of vast expanses of land, an economic situation was interpreted through several new aesthetic theories that are uniquely English.  This podcast discusses the rise of the “Picturesque” as a category of landscape.

 
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Mar
26
2010

Schiller: Naive and Sentimental Poetry

Schiller’s “Naïve and Sentimental Poetry”

“Naïve and Sentimental Poetry”, published in the journal, Die Horen, seems to pit Göethe, the naïve poet, against Schiller, the sentimental poet.  The essay is an early and influential effort to sort out types of artists, as makers and as psychologies.  Naïve and Sentimental” refers to both poets and to poetry, not to themes, subject matter, or content, and are seen by Schiller as opposites, somewhat like Kant’s antinomies—a way of organizing the world in terms of contrasts.  It is here that the famous “compare and contrast” methodology of art historical discourse begins, for Schiller’s comparative pairing of poets will be copied by the early Twentieth Century art historian, Aby Warburg, who was also fascinated by psychological themes.  That being said, Schiller’s ultimate purpose goes beyond his purpose of understanding two kinds of genius and two means of artistic creation.  He analyzes modes of perception, ways of being, and ways of living in the world, ways of relating and responding, not only to nature itself but also to one’s own inner nature, to the structure of one’s own mind.

In establishing between psychological types, Schiller paved the way for later thinkers, such as Freud and Jung, Nietzsche and Dilthey, and James, as the originator of the notion of psychological types.  But Schiller’s aesthetic is also a moral philosophy.  It was an examination of the human being and the human condition in a world that is so modern it had yet to be defined, discussed or understood.  Schiller’s predecessor in grappling with the new place of nature in the newly industrialized society would be René Descartes who advocated a turning away from the artificiality of French society to the simplicity of nature to rediscover the “natural” human being, free of civilization and its “discontents”, as Freud would express it later.  Schiller leads the way to the Nineteenth Century and to Modernism, for his world is far more “civilized” than that of Rousseau.  Both philosophers (who would influence Freud on this point) understood civilization to be necessary and inevitable and unavoidable, the result of Rousseau’s “Social Contract”, but the social system has built a wall of rules, regulations, and conventions that is entirely artificial.  Trapped in the social system, blindly following its customs and mores, we are alienated from nature and the natural.  We have lost our sense of oneness, our feelings of harmony with our world.  Worse yet, we are alienated from ourselves, divided within our own minds, disconnected from the totality of our own being.

Responding to a system that purports to be “rational”, we struggle with our irrational side, repressing it until we are alienated not only from it but also from a part of our selves.  Thus we, as humans in the modern world, are alienated from nature itself, which is neither rational nor irrational.  Nature simply exists in a state of pure being which we, in our divided state, can no longer comprehend or connect with.  In our alienated condition—alienated from ourselves and from our fellow human beings—we can only respond to nature through the distorting filters of civilization.  Our varying modes of perception—“Naïve“ or “Sentimental”—can never encounter nature, the pure state of being.  Such unity must wait until we reach our own natural state of harmony within ourselves and our natural environment.

Like Rousseau, Schiller does not present “Natural Man” as a lost state but a goal we must aim for.  This goal cannot be reached in an individual’s lifetime but can be achieved only through successive generations, which must struggle to regain wholeness, harmony, and unity, both internally, within the individual, and externally, with nature.  This modern concept of the alienated human being seeking a lost unity would be of great consequence to Nineteenth and Twentieth Century thought. The author of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, writing somewhat later than Schiller, warned that we have become estranged and alienated from ourselves and from nature. As the allegory of the creation of Frankenstein’s monster shows, we have become deluded into playing God through the misuse of technology.  G. W. F. Hegel will write of “thesis”, “antithesis”, and “synthesis”, the ultimate Absolute unity.  Karl Marx will write of “alienation” of the working class from industrial products and will warn that humans have become so alienated that we are no longer aware of it and exist in a state of “false consciousness”.  Marx’s “alienation” was sociological due to economic causes.  Jacques Lacan will write of Lack, resulting from the human’s entry into society and the severing of the child from its mother (loss of unity and wholeness).  Alienation will be come a major theme and perhaps the definition of the condition of Modernity itself.

Thus aesthetic philosophy becomes a moral philosophy and art becomes an arena for self-actualization, a way of thought to counter the evils of artificiality and civilization. For Schiller, in “Naïve and Sentimental Poetry”, all art is inferior to nature but all art must begin with nature. Art becomes a way of reacting to ourselves and a means of responding to nature.  Nature takes on a dual meaning: nature is the world surrounding us and our own individual personalities.  Art also seems to assume duality, being equated at times with that which is artificial, in other words with a wide range of artifacts, works and activities, while, at other times, art is the natural product of a creative process.  Art was a means of restoring a natural balance in personality.  Art was a journey towards a purer morality and an exposition of the nature of artistic genius that rises above artificial rules and ideas on morality.  The role of free play of imagination in art and the artist as a genius is indebted to Kant.  Six decades later, perhaps thinking of Schiller, Emil Zola famously wrote of “nature seen through a corner of a temperament” to define art, which is, in those terms, a response to nature shaped by the personality of the artist.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

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Mar
19
2010

Friedrich Schiller

Friedrich Schiller (1759 – 1805)

“Art” and what the term means and how the object is apprehended and the discourse that surrounds its objects emanates out of aesthetics, which is a branch of philosophy.  The discourse about art, art criticism, art history, and art theory all are variations on philosophy.  Kant’s use of aesthetics was to establish the grounds for the viewing of art—disinterestedness—the grounds for beauty—necessity—and absolute universality of aesthetic criteria.  In many ways, his philosophy is divided.  On one hand, there is absoluteness and rules of judging; but, on the other hand, there is the new Romantic artist who is called upon to “play” and to create new “rules” for art by breaking rules through creative invention.  It will be up to Friedrich Schiller to expound upon this gap in Kantian philosophy by concentrating on the artist.

Schiller was writing his essays at a pivotal moment in time.  Germany was not yet a unified or modern country, nor did it have a powerful middle class.  As a nation it had yet to be industrialized and faced another century and a half of autocratic rule, and, yet Romanticism with its emphasis on the individual somehow managed to thrive in artistic circles.  Schiller died four decades before Marx would re-define alienation but the poet foresaw what the philosopher would witness, the splitting of the modern personality, rent between intellect and emotion.  Schiller’s stress on the emotional aspects of alienation is best understood in response to the subjectivism of the Romantic era and as an answer to the highly artificial age of the Enlightenment, which stressed reason and rationality in the name of nature, creating an overly mannered society through rules.  Acutely aware of the modern agony of alienation, Schiller sought to lead humans towards wholeness through art, where intellect and emotions could be resolved into a healthy and united whole.  Art allows all aspects of the mind to indulge in “free play” and creates a place where reason and passion can become balanced into a perfected form.

If Kant is the “head” or “intellect” of aesthetics, then Schiller is the “heart” of art philosophy.  While Kant’s discussion of art was strictly conceptual and abstract, Schiller was a poet himself and knew of the problems and rewards of creation.  But Schiller was also a playwright and a philosopher who was aware of his condition as a “hermaphrodite” or a hybrid creature: the artist who was also a philosopher.  But Schiller the artist appeared in his philosophical writings only in his poetic and rhetorical tone, for he rarely wrote on art itself.  Schiller followed not just the lead of Kant but also the lead of Baumgarten in writing aesthetics for the Romantic period.  Kant wrote of the abstract arabesque as his ideal form of the beautiful, but Baumgarten had envisioned art as having a more central role in human life and so did Schiller.  “On the Aesthetic Education of Man”, 1795, concerns itself with the importance of the “aesthetic” that is the sensuous as a counterpoint to the intellectual for the development of the human being.  Kant’s Critique of Judgment was the capstone of his epistemological theory, but Schiller was concerned less with theory and more with the predicament of modern life.

“On the Aesthetic Education of Man” was written as a series of letters to the Duke of Augustenburg and was published in 1795 and 1801.  “Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” was also written in 1795 as a response to his friendship with Germany’s most celebrated Romantic poet, Göethe, comparing himself as a poet to his friend as a poet.  Johann Wolfgang von Göethe had written the quintessential work of German Romanticism, the rather overwrought, Sorrows of Young Werther, the fictional version of many youthful love affairs.  However, as he matured, Göethe assumed a mantle of dignity, of near-Olympian calm, and repudiated Romanticism as “sick” and extolled (neo) Classicism as “healthy”.  The famous friendship got off to a rocky start.  Göethe spurned the advances of the younger poet whose dramatic plays were associated with Romanticism.  And Schiller, for his part, viewed Göethe with antipathy, distrusting the apparent ease with which poetry apparently flowed from this distinguished inhabitant of Olympia.  Nevertheless, the younger poet who experienced creative agonies and self-doubts was driven by a need to understand Göethe and pursued the poet.  The two men eventually succeeded in achieving a meeting of the minds and their consequent correspondence and collaboration is of great importance to German literature.

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Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

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Mar
19
2010

Podcast 16 Romanticism in England, Part One

THE WRITING OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM

Like Neo-Classicism, Romanticism was an international movement, but, unlike the earlier movement, Romanticism differed from country to country. In England, Romanticism established an aesthetic that was reflective of national conditions. The British Romantic artists were closely aligned to the Romantic poets and a new group of philosophers and art writers emerged to explain this new national form of English Romanticism.

 

 

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Mar
12
2010

Kant, the Artist, and Artistic Freedom

Kant,  the Artist and Artistic Freedom

The modern artist of the Nineteenth Century faced an aesthetic landscape that was quite different compared to that of the previous century.  The definition of “art” in the Eighteenth Century was that, which was sanctioned by the Church, the State or the aristocracy.  The definition of the “artist” in the Eighteenth Century was a trained technician who produced commissioned objects for these powers.  The definition of “subject matter” or “content” in a work of art was that which had been approved of by the client or patron.   Within these definitions of “art” and “artist” the cultural producer had a certain freedom of interpretation, but, ultimately, most artists were answerable to those who controlled the sites for art.

By the Nineteenth Century, the artist had lost a great deal of the traditional support system and faced a changing definition of the “artist” as a free and independent “genius.” The idea of a genius is a product of the Enlightenment concept of the individual as a free and independent human being who is allowed freedom of speech and expression as “natural rights.”  The role of the artist within Kant’s concept of aesthetics is that of a maker who must create new forms.  The artist is now free of any external “commands” from patrons or the audience.  His/her only role is that of being a “genius,” who gives free range to the imagination.  The result of Kantian philosophy is the elevation of the artist to “creator” and the exaltation of artistic originality.  There is a new value to artistic experience as such and a new affirmation of emotional aspects of art.  The notion of the expressive function of art is not unrelated to the new definition of “sensibility,” as an ability to feel and to express oneself.  In addition, there was a new importance attached to the invention of a fiction about the new Romantic artist, who was now the hero, the god, and the genius.  The genius is the one with exceptional intellectual and spiritual endowments, the one who breaks the rules and who creates breakthroughs to new possibilities for subsequent artists.

Genius, according to Kant, is that “natural endowment of mental aptitude which gives rule to art”.  Fine art is possible only as a “product of genius,” which produces essentially original art.  Originality or the ability to be original sets the genius apart from the need to imitate either other works of art or the  real world itself.   The artist or genius also has no need to respond to communal needs.  Thus art and beauty ceased to be communal or traditional, but instead became ideas, molded by the exceptional individual.  This exceptionalism alienates the artist from the rest of society and the artist is now no longer an integrated member of society and it is the artist him/herself who is the real subject of every work of art.

Suddenly, the artist is no longer the artisan working at the beck and call of an autocratic patron, suddenly the artist is no longer the illustrator of the message of the patron, suddenly the artist is no longer and interior decorator.  The artist has been recreated as a “genius,” who is required to play.  Play becomes a major concept within Kantian aesthetics.  Play, in art, performs the same role as technology in the Industrial Revolution in that playing produces constant “progress” or change in art.  Like technology, art responds to itself and evolves according to its own rules.  By mid-Twentieth Century, art critics and art historians have incorporated the implied notion of teleology—art progresses and evolves towards a goal.  Kant’s ideas were reinterpreted for another century, a century that developed the concept of evolution and continued to believe in the optimism of the Enlightenment.

A true child of Romanticism, the Kantian artist is a rule-breaker, not the rational rule follower of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment ended with the French Revolution, a product of political reason but the end of the faith in rationalism.  The sight of mob rule, the experience of government by rabble-rousers, and the blood soaked Terror was the end of Enlightenment optimism and faith in human nature.  But the ideals of the Enlightenment—freedom and individuality lived on long after the culture’s disillusionment over the failure of reason.  If humans could not be rational, as was hoped, then they must be constrained by laws. France became an empire under an Emperor, trading equality and fraternity for order.  The artist becomes the one truly liberated member of Nineteenth Century society, detached and free, like a homeless person—ultimately dangerous in an increasingly regulated society.

Aesthetics was split between rule and play.  The Critique of Judgment set in motion an idea of the autonomy of a work of art, an idea that spread beyond philosophy and permeated the artistic community.  For artists, Kantian concepts gave them a new reason to make art; for critics, Kantian concepts gave a new way to talk about art.  One half of the Critique, that which concerns itself with rules, becomes linked to the Academy, especially in France and England.  Following the rules meant following the dictates of ancient art and copying the antique masters. The other half of aesthetics—play—belonged to the independent artist and survived into the Romantic Era and, indeed, characterized the period.  Play, like technology, is coupled with progress and evolution, because play leads to innovation and change which results in “progress” for art.  The new concept of play and invention was linked to the free play of the artistic  imagination, putting the artist in a position of dominance over the demands of the academy.  If art was to “progress,” rules would have to be broken by the artist.  But for the artist to break the rules, s/he must have artistic freedom.  Artistic freedom was not a new idea, for artists had always struggled against the demands of troublesome clients (Michelangelo’s assertion of autonomy over  Pope Julius II comes to mind).  However, Kantian aesthetic philosophy constructed a set of concepts that articulated the ideas that would form Romantic thinking: genius and artistic freedom.  The idea of artistic change, led to multiple art movements and “isms” throughout the Nineteenth Century and into the next, the Twentieth, until the challenge of Postmodernism.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

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