Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 8 Number 1, April 2007
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Karlholm, Dan, The Art of Illusion. The Representation of Art History in Nineteenth-Century Germany and Beyond, Bern, Peter Lang: 2006. Second edition. 272p. 3-03910-958-8. Paperback $52,95
Reviewed by
Princeton University
This study engages the different pictorial and rhetorical strategies, media and institutions that contributed to representing art history, as universal or general art history, in 19th century Germany. The focus is on the post-Hegelian, pre-Nietzschean period roughly between 1830 and 1870.
Karlholm is especially interested in bringing to fruition post-structural and semiotic ideas that help uncover the representational strategies and their after-lifes in the historiography of art history. However, he does not adopt any one methodology; at times, thus, it is unclear in how far a reference to, e.g. Derrida actually helps to clarify the problem at stake. Methodologically, Karlholm tries to achieve a ‘tacit critique of some of the most ingrained disciplinary conventions and hegemonic ‘identity politics’ of art history. I proceed, in principle, through a rhythmic reading of the historical work and a non-systematic meditation on residues and ‘after-images’ in the contexts of its own site of production and of its subsequent historio-graphic production’ (15).
The four chapters engage different media and strategies of representation. They are tightly organized and well argued. They manage to throw new light on the organizing principles that inform these fundamental representations, but as such, also constructions of the field of art history. The first and second chapters engages the narrative and nationalist strategies of the first book of ‘general art history’, Franz Kugler’s Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte (1841-1842) and the accompanying collection of illustrations. Although, in a Foucaultian sense, Karlholm tracks discoursive formations rather than origins, in presenting this book as a sort of origin of such a formation (general art history), he has to exclude and reject the tradition that informed it. To a certain degree, thus, he constructs the origin that he refuses to consider as such.
The arguments presented, however, are lucid and informative; Karlholm manages to both rescue the text and the accompanying Bilderatlas Denkmäler der Kunst (along with other books and works that were culturally enormously important but are rather obliterated today, like Lübke’s, Spinger’s or the work of the artist Kaulbach) by analysing the conventions, metaphors, and cultural expectations that were informed by them and, in turn, guided their production; he considers these texts and images in their capacity to construct a totality of general art history as well as the moments that subvert such a cultural phantasm (e.g. the distribution of the illustrations on the page). Karlholm argues that the illustrations should not be seen as inferior reproductions, but as transparent graphics that in fact point to something beyond themselves; constituting their own discursive representational universe, they have to been seen in the context of the image and travel cultural that unites modern bourgeois tourism and art historical conventions of seeing the real object (sight/site). Radicalising his argument, he disputes the possibility of a ‘real object of art’ unmediated by any form of representation, and thus also point to structural biases in art historical thinking.
The third chapter engages the genre overlap between art historical handbooks and travel guides, while the fourth and final one analysis the program, architecturally and pictorially, of two important institutional representations of art history, the Munich and Berlin museum complexes (both Pinakotheken, and the old and new museums). All chapters, while primarily concerned with the representation of “Art” and its connection to history, or historiography, also discuss 20th century works of art that relate, reflect or deconstruct this tradition. At times, the relations between these works and the work that do with regard to their reference could have been sharpened; one would also have wished for a summary that pulls together the different moments and cultural contexts and strategies contributing to the idea, discursive formation or cultural phantasm of general art history. It remains especially unclear, how, except for an engagement with Arthur Danto, what exact conclusions should be drawn with regard (and with regard to which) conventions of art history today.
The final chapter, in fact, by stating the end of this kind of museal and universal representation of art, somehow leaves the impression, contrary to the stated methodology, that the study followed a historical narrative from the origin to the end of discourse. Another point of concern would be the oblique, and never fully argued, references to the political consequences of this, by no means only German (pace Napoleon), ideal of universal and total knowledge and construction of Art (pp. 201 lacking evidence for the claim that Kaulbach’s Zerstörung Jerusalems durch Titus was considered anti-Semitic and admired as such; pp.202 speaking rather unscholarly of the ‘God-damned Third Reich’, 250). More contextual and historical sensibility would have been appropriate; when e.g. considering the woodcut as ‘Germanic’ genre, a 19th century interpretation along ethnic lines is reinforced rather than deconstructed with regard to its middle European origin.
It is one of the strengths of the book to point out that, despite its paradoxes, ‘the purpose of the German museum of art, intimately related to the emerging discipline of art history with all its visual supplements, was indeed to create the possibility of continuing the history of art’ (252), rather than to historicize and ‘consecrate’ and thus distance art as a thing of the past.
The book would certainly be of interest not only to historians of art concerned with the implications of their own discipline and its genesis, but also to intellectual historians and scholars of European and German Studies.