CLASHING VIEWS RESHAPE ART HISTORY
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SOME CALL THEM ''RADICALS,'' ''REVISION-ists'' or simply troublemakers. But to others -and to themselves - they are challenging the traditional insularity of art history. Energetic, contentious and often controversial, they are a loose-knit community of scholars in universities throughout the country who use methods derived from outside the field to study the visual arts as more than a purely esthetic phenomenon.
They are cued by such lines of thought as structuralism, feminism and in some cases Marxism, which in art history is an attempt to relate art to class structure within the context of economic, social and political issues. They are also in touch with such disciplines as psychoanalysis, anthropology and linguistics and aware of currents from France and England. Busily undermining traditional myths and theories about the making of art, they view it as reflecting social practices, and they are more concerned with ''issues'' than with what they call formalist investigations into style, subject matter and history of ownership. Their fields of interest range from Islamic and medieval art to Abstract Expressionism, the subject of a recent polemical treatise suggesting that the movement was used as a political tool by the United States Government in the cold war.
When dealing with a work of art, the revisionists tend to stress its relationship to the socio-political climate of its time, rather than focusing on such esthetic elements as shape, color and composition. For example, writing about Manet's nude, ''Olympia,'' in his book, ''The Painting of Modern Life,'' the Marxist-oriented art historian Timothy J. Clark places emphasis on the view of prostitution that the painting conveys in this particular era of social history. More traditional historians might emphasize such atrributes as the contrasts of light and dark, the visible brushwork, the flat patterning characteristic of Manet's innovative approach to the painted image.
The revisionist thinking - which has long established itself in such other areas of the humanities as history and literary criticism - has brought ferment and change to a field that some feel has too long suffered from academic isolation. It has caused conflict at such prestigious universities as Harvard and Princeton. It has led to a revamping of the famed museum training program at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum, where emphasis is now placed on ''intellectual'' rather than ''esthetic'' issues. It has shaken up the annual forums of the College Art Association, the national professional group for art historians, where topics once considered marginal to mainstream art history are now given equal weight. It is reaching the public through books that are eagerly issued by such university presses as Chicago and Yale. And it has even given birth to a major art institution, the Orsay Museum of the 19th Century in Paris, which - though now watered down to accommodate both traditional and revisionist approaches -was born of the notion that art relates to the historical, social and political forces of its era.
Today, as they teach, write and lecture, the revisionists are shaping the tastes of a new generation of curators, collectors, critics, dealers - and, inevitably, the public. Already, suggests Oleg Grabar, Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Art at Harvard and former chairman of the art history department, the new trends in art historical thinking have increased public interest in areas other than the traditional ''high'' art of Western culture - such as the decorative arts, the history of architecture and so-called primitive art.
Continue reading the main storyTheir diversity makes it hard to label the revisionists as a group - indeed, some regard that diversity as now the norm in the field. ''Art history today is much more about exchanges with other disciplines,'' says Kurt Forster, director of the innovative Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Santa Monica, Calif. He points out that half of the scholars working on art research projects at the Getty Center are from fields other than art history.
But even today, the challengers do not go entirely unchallenged. Two recent targets have been Professor Clark, 44, a specialist in French 19th-century art, and Thomas Crow, 39, a revisionist art historian who received two prestigeful awards for his book on art in 18th-century France. In 1983, questions were raised by a visiting committee to Harvard's art history department about whether Professor Clark's teaching approach was too closed to other views. And in 1986, after five years at Princeton, Mr. Crow was refused tenure, a move that helped spur the departure of John Shearman, a respected Renaissance historian who supported him.
To be sure, the ''social'' view of art by its historians is not all that new. Before mid-century, such European Marxist thinkers as Frederick Antal and Arnold Hauser had done influential work in dealing with the relationship of art and society. And in this country, in 1937, the historian Milton Brown published a pioneering Marxist analysis of the painting of the French Revolution. Younger socially oriented art historians, such as Linda Nochlin, professor of art history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and Robert Herbert, professor of art history at Yale, have since helped to spread revisionist views through legions of students. What's more, in ''The Painting of Modern Life,'' Professor Clark acknowledges the inspiration of the art historian Meyer Schapiro's Marxist writing of the 1930's. Art and Society
The most visible public evidence of the new approach is the controversial Orsay Museum, opened last December in Paris. The result of new thinking about how museums should relate to their public, it was originally planned to show the connections between art and the larger culture. Under the Socialist Government of Francois Mitterrand, the program was revamped to place art in the context of social and political history. But as now constituted, the Orsay is a compromise of traditional art historical and revisionist approaches, in which the most banal Salon art of the era is celebrated along with masterworks of the Impressionist avant-garde.
In this country, the new thinking has invaded the College Art Association of America. At its annual meeting in Houston this February, symposiums - led by prominent teachers at major universities - will let the full membership discuss such formerly peripheral topics as ''Assessing the Marxist Tradition'' and ''Art and Authority.'' The association's sessions were drastically revamped in 1985 to make them more of an ''intellectual reckoning,'' says Harvey Stahl, a medievalist and associate professor of art history at the University of California at Berkeley, who, as program chairman that year, introduced the revisions.
As Henri Zerner, professor of fine art at the Fogg Art Museum, sees it, the new wave is gaining strength partly because of the disenchantment felt by ''a growing minority of art historians, particularly the younger ones. There's a feeling that too many professionals are routinely feeding a busy academic machine. Although established art history pretends to be objective, it is in fact allied to a conservative ideology and very involved with the art market.''
''The field is going through a generational passage,'' adds Thomas Crow, who is now an associate professor of art history at the University of Michigan. ''It has expanded so much, and the clublike atmosphere that has prevailed in the Eastern universities is changing as well. The view that art is bound up with social interaction unites a lot of people.''
Yet, while acknowledging a place for the new methodologies, Sidney Freedberg, a traditionalist who was professor of fine art at Harvard and is now chief curator of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, took issue with them in a 1985 talk before the Art Dealers Association of America. ''Many of the studies which approach art from a sociological or an economic point of view,'' said Professor Freedberg, ''lavish far more effort and attention on the factors that surround the art than the art itself, as if the setting, not the stone, were the important matter.''
Robert Rosenblum, professor of fine arts at New York University, and something of a revisionist himself, is concerned about the prevalence of the trend. ''I'm for the social history of art,'' he says, ''but also for all kinds of other approaches. I would not want art history departments to be taken over by a Marxist mafia. Why are people who want to change the class structure involved with art history? Why don't they go on to do something real?'' Esthetic Merits
A sore point for the traditionalists is ''connoisseurship,'' a term coined by the arch-guru of art historians, Bernard Berenson, for judging an object's esthetic merits and its relation to other works by means of the scholar's trained eye. ''What the radicals are really about is the destruction of connoisseurship,'' said Hilton Kramer, the art critic and editor of the conservative magazine of culture, The New Criterion. ''They're substituting social science for art history. The whole question of how you distinguish one picture from another is tossed out. It all becomes a Marxist scenario of markets, class structure and so forth. The quality of the work of art and its derivation from an esthetic tradition is regarded as peripheral.''
Lending fuel to the fire is the fact that Harvard, whose great teaching instrument, the Fogg Art Museum, was once the capital of connoisseurship, producing generations of museum curators who ended up at leading institutions, has revised its museum-training program. The former introductory course in connoisseurship is now called ''Methods of Art History,'' and according to Professor Oleg Grabar, who now teaches it, the course addresses ''intellectual issues'' rather than the esthetic evaluation of objects. ''Connoisseurship is not dead - you can't do art history without it,'' says Mr. Grabar. ''But it is only one criterion and one which may have been too influenced by the art market and collectors.''
It is too early to tell what effect the de-emphasis on connoisseurship might have on American museums. But Carter Brown, director of the National Gallery in Washington and himself weaned on the discipline, says: ''Universities have traditionally been the places where people were trained to deal with works of art as objects - to develop a sense of what they mean in the history of human values, and to enable them to tell the difference between the real and the fake. I'd hate to see the day when they simply abdicated that responsibility.''
But the revisionists insist that their interpretive work is based on close reading of art objects. ''One of the striking things about the new people is that they work on first-rate art,'' says Svetlana Alpers, professor of art history at the University of California at Berkeley and author of a forthcoming book called ''Rembrandt's Enterprise: The Studio and the Market.'' ''It's a bit of a smokescreen to say they're losing the work in the context. The best of them, no matter the social and economic sweep of their views, have a sense of the nature of pictorial achievement.''
Among the more controversial of the Young Turks are Timothy J. Clark and two of his former students, Thomas Crow and Serge Guilbaut. Mr. Clark, an Englishman trained at Cambridge University and the Courtauld Institute in London, has been professor of art history at Harvard since 1980 (he will take up a new post at the University of California at Berkeley next summer).
He has published three books on French art in the 19th century, an era of political and esthetic revolution for which the revisionists have a decided affinity. ''The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers'' (1985), his most recent work, connects art with the social practices of the period. While Mr. Clark's two earlier books were praised for their writing and scholarship, this one has drawn fire from some critics who see its socio-economic emphasis as scanting the artists' intentions and their esthetic sensibilities.
At Harvard Mr. Clark has been a thorn in a few sides. A charismatic personality who is also respected as a scholar (though light-hearted colleagues refer to his students as ''Clarkettes''), he is in some eyes arrogant and intolerant of others' views. His former colleague Sidney Freedberg says: ''He politicized the department, and tried to diminish the interest of graduate students in attendance at courses given by teachers in a more conventional way.''
Mr. Clark says: ''I think that art history has problems. It's an undernourished and troubled discipline. Thank God there are some signs of renewal, but this renewal is not helped by the way things inevitably get converted into some kind of intellectual Star Wars.'' A Tenure Debate
Debate has also touched Thomas Crow. After the 1985 publication of his book, ''Painters and Public Life'' - a social and political history of art in 18th-century France that analyzes the interplay between artists such as Watteau, Greuze, David and the public - he was refused tenure at Princeton. According to Mr. Crow, a written statement from the chairman of the art history department lauded his teaching and his scholarship, but charged that his point of view in the book was ''too lopsided and did not give sufficient consideration to the artistic or art historical aspects'' of his material. The book later won two prestigious awards.
Asked why Mr. Crow was not given tenure, William A. P. Childs, an archeologist who heads Princeton's art history department, said that the reasons were ''totally confidential,'' but that they had nothing to do with Mr. Crow's teaching methods. What had he thought of the book? ''I'm a classical archeologist,'' Mr. Childs said, simply.
A third focus of controversy is Serge Guilbaut, whose 1983 book, ''How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art,'' reaches some controversial conclusions about the relationship of Abstract Expressionism to the cold war. The French-born art historian argues that the Abstract Expressionist painters - Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and others - had turned from representationalism to abstraction after a series of devastating political disillusionments, among them the use of the atomic bomb in 1945. At the height of the cold war, in 1948, he maintains, their powerful - but nonpolitical - imagery was seized on by the United States liberal leadership as a symbol of American cultural authority in the postwar world.
In the book, Mr. Guilbaut attacks ''traditional'' historians of the period as producing ''positive, heroic and optimistic'' accounts. Among them is Irving Sandler, professor of art history at the State University of New York at Purchase, and author of perhaps the best-known work on the period, ''The Triumph of American Painting.'' Says Mr. Sandler: ''Writers like Guilbaut submerge the work of art in theory and ideology. His enterprise is to make Abstract Expressionism the art of American imperialism. Not only are his dates in error, but he does not bother much with the analysis and interpretation of the art he is writing about. I think the book is meretricious, and wrong.''
Lively, disputatious and provocative, the field of art history has changed significantly in recent years. And many see the changes as healthy. ''After all,'' says Kurt Forster of the Getty Center, ''the serious study of art will always challenge the assumptions you make about it.'' Two views of a Manet ''What Manet has done is to rearrange a momentary view creating a permanent artistic statement without losing the active excitement of the immediate impression. He has done this by subtly shifting the elements of his picture in relation to each other and to the picture plane, preserving the sensuous textures which give the picture its tangible reality, but sacrificing precise naturalism.'' ANNE COFFIN HANSON Catalogue essay for ''Edouard Manet: 1832-1883,'' Philadelphia Museum of Art and Art Institute of Chicago. 1966-1967. ''She is detached: that is the best description. She looks out steadily at something or somebody, the various things which constrain and determine her, and finds that they all float by 'with the same specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of money.' The customer evidently thinks she is one more such object which money can buy, and in a sense it is part of her duties to maintain the illusion.'' TIMOTHY J. CLARK ''The Painting of Modern Life,'' 1985.
A version of this article appears in print on December 20, 1987, on Page 2002001 of the National edition with the headline: CLASHING VIEWS RESHAPE ART HISTORY. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
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